


The Season

by RedHorse



Series: Tomarry/Harrymort prompt fills [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blitz - Freeform, Gen, London, WWII, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 05:06:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15988241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: A Ravenclaw witch wasn’t Tom Riddle’s first kill. Or his second, or his third...





	The Season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Glorilian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glorilian/gifts), [Lord_of_the_Snakes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lord_of_the_Snakes/gifts).



“Remember Tom, no magic.”  
  
Tom smiled at Slughorn in the indulgent way the professor liked best. “I’ll remember.”  
  
“And, take care,” Slughorn added, more uncertain. “We hear the Muggle war is becoming quite untidy.”  
  
Tom wondered what kind of war was tidy, while ducking his head to Slughorn as though in deference. “Of course. I appreciate your concern.”  
  
It was the end of Tom’s second year. He had progress to make with the other students, but Slughorn had been easily cultivated before Tom was even well into his first term. Slughorn craved the kind of attention from his students that was harder to find in Slytherin than in other houses. The snakes didn’t have the automatic respect for their elders that typical children did. Tom had less of it than anyone, of course, but he was willing to pretend.  
  
With a final, hesitant smile, Slughorn backed away from the Hogsmeade platform and Tom boarded the train.  
  
*  
  
“They won’t take you,” said a sharp, high voice  behind Tom a half day later, when he stood looking up at the gates of Wool’s orphanage. They were chained and locked.  
  
“They’re all gone,” the voice went on. “They aren’t taking new orphans anymore.”  
  
Tom looked over his shoulder at the least impressive boy he had ever seen. He was scrawny and bowlegged from a short life full of starvation and disease, he was missing more teeth than he had left, and the right side of his face was lumpy and misshapen. His eyes were hard, shiny and black under a fringe of lank brown hair.  
  
“So it would appear,” Tom said, loathe to even speak to such an atrocious Muggle, but he was without another convenient source of information. He rested a hand on his trunk and considered the boy.  
  
“Why did they evacuate?”  
  
“The blitz,” he said, looking at Tom as though he was slow. He pointed toward the skyline, which included a few crumbling structures that had been intact the summer before. “Where did you come from?” His tone shifted as he looked from Tom’s smooth hair and healthy pallor to his plain clean and quality trousers, shoes and shirt. “Are you a good samaratain?”  
  
Tom couldn’t contain his smirk. He wasn’t used to maintaining the pleasant demeanor he’d perfected at Hogwarts here in the shadow of Wool’s Orphanage.  
  
“No, I’m an orphan,” he assured the boy. “Who are you?”  
  
The boy looked skeptical, but he answered Tom’s question anyway. “Jimmy Billings,” he said, with a stiff bow, which he seemed to perform without thinking and left him flushed with embarrassment. Tom, not fully accustomed to having this effect when he wasn’t really trying, smiled. It felt good to be respected automatically, as he ought.  
  
There was a commotion a street over, and before either boy could react, it was spilling over and into them. A dozen men were in the pitch of the kind of artless fighting that looks, to an observer, more like grappling than anything else, but with the occasional wet impact of a punch.  
  
By the time Tom could control his surprise, one of the men was dragging his trunk away from the fray.  
  
“You!” Tom cried. “Stop!” He started to pursue  
but felt a weak but insistent hand on his arm. Snarling, he shook it off, finding himself looking down into Jimmy’s asymmetrical face.  
  
“We need to run,” said the boy, urgently, just as one of the men knocked them both from their feet. In the course of being kneed and kicked and trampled, Tom half rolled over the smaller boy. It had nothing to do with protective instinct, and as soon as he could he was back on his feet and sprinting after the man who’d taken the trunk.  
  
It was no longer lightened. Removing the charm was the last bit of magic Tom had performed before placing his wand safely inside, locking the trunk and striking off into Muggle London.  
  
So the man dragging it hadn’t gotten far before a few of the others had noticed his boon. Tom nearly collided with the original thief, cradling a broken arm and retracing his steps, and then came upon two more men each carrying one end by the handles.  
  
“That’s mine!” Tom shouted. He’d gut them. He’d get his wand and—and the ministry would think it was self defense. They’d be aghast that Tom had been sent back to the city under these conditions. He’d—he’d be let back in Hogwarts for the summer, surely...  
  
The men were looking at Tom, one without much interest and the other with rather too much. Tom was thirteen but he’d been noticing those sorts of looks for years.  
  
“My father is coming,” he told them. “He’ll be happy to pay you for it.”  
  
The man who didn’t seem inclined toward Tom was dark haired and wiry, but not like Jimmy—he was obviously keeping himself fed in the chaos of London at war. Probably by thieving from thieves, as he’d just demonstrated and which Tom did not condemn, on principle. It was only that these were _Tom’s_ things. The companion was taller but rounder in the shoulders, and had a long narrow scar that stretched from one temple to the other, a surgically perfect arc over his brow.  
  
“That’s where you generally find fathers, at the gates of Wool’s.” The little one rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Jove.”  
  
Jove grunted mutely and made to obey, but Tom saw them going — with all his worldly possessions, with his wand — and saw red. He bolted after them.

Jove had a sturdy fist for one with few noticeable muscles, and it caught the right side of Tom’s jaw and laid him out on the street, blood in his mouth, sick with rage and desperation. By the time he got his bearings and stood the men and the trunk were gone and Jimmy Billings was plucking at his sleeve.  
  
“Are you alright, Tom?”  
  
Tom tamped down his murderous intent and mustered a troubled affect instead. “Jimmy,” he said, voice small. “I have nowhere to go.”

*

  
Jimmy’s father was a very poor—in every sense of the word— tailor. Jimmy’s mother had been a maid, but she died slowly from shrapnel injuries from one of the earliest bombing incidents the previous fall. Jimmy had been with her when the bomb fell, running ahead, and the force of the blast had thrown him far and he’d landed on his face. That’s what left most of the bones on that side of his face irreparably crushed.  
  
He was lucky, Mr. Billings liked to remind him sharply when he caught Jimmy gingerly touching his own face, or wincing when he saw his own reflection. Lucky he still had his eye. Lucky to be alive. Or at least, Tom assumed that’s what Mr. Billings meant. He certainly didn’t care enough to ask.  
  
Mr. Billings had a soft spot for his only child, and couldn’t quite bring himself to deny taking Tom in, after Jimmy’s absurd claim Tom protected him during the fighting. Still, he gave clear instructions Tom was to earn enough to keep himself fed. This meant mending, which Tom had learned from mending his own clothes and various sewing projects at the orphanage. Tom was not terribly proficient, but it took very little skill to meet Mr. Billings’s standard. In the evenings when the light failed, they stopped working there and laid down on bedrolls in the trench Mr. Billings had dug in their tiny back garden.  
  
It was there the snake found Tom.  
  
_Speaker_ , she said. _I have been searching_ .  
  
He knew her from the gardens at the orphanage. She had grown well since he had last seen her; her body was sleek and large, and her scales had a healthy gleam. Maybe war benefitted no one but the snakes.  
  
Tom was muttering mostly nonsense in reply. Snakes appreciated nonsense. Then he realized, through the darkness, that Mr. Billings was awake and horrified.

  
“Get out,” Mr. Billings gasped at once.  
  
Tom sighed. He took the snake with him and struck out into the night, just as the distinctive whistle of a V1 engine became audible.  
  
He was helpless to do anything except plaster himself against a wall and cover his ears. The unpiloted craft drew nearer and nearer, louder and louder until it deafened him. It was safe while it was running, he reminded himself as it passed overheard and continued on. By the time it went silent, a brief lull before impact and the blast, Tom was safely out of range. The noise still buffeted him.  
  
He continued in the darkness.  
  
*  
  
Tom thought about Slughorn on the platform. How he’d seemed regretful, nervous. Tom knew that wizards didn’t pay much attention to the Muggle world. Even magical children with Muggle families were so discouraged from keeping up their Muggle ties upon leaving school, that most of them bowed to the cultural pressure and left Muggle society altogether.  
  
But the Hogwarts staff, and the Ministry liaison who occasionally checked in with Tom, could not have missed the air raids and evacuations. Certainly not the pile of rubble that literally sat where the public entrance to Diagon Alley had been located. Now Tom imagined one must use one of the private entrances in a specific business, but no one ever told Tom where those were.  
  
It wasn’t hope, exactly, that kept him near the orphanage and easy to find, just in case. But when he watched autos and even wagons leaving the city for the safety of the countryside, he couldn’t bring himself to follow.  
  
He waited for an apologetic, ridiculous rescuer wearing robes, or even for an owl. Nothing came.  
  
He only had to make it a few more weeks, at this point.  
  
*  
  
Jimmy Billings was bringing Tom food at the orphanage gates every day at noon. If the sirens sounded and they were delayed, Tom went hungry. He wasn’t going to beg. The snake in his pocket had told him that when food is scarce one should be still. It was typical of a snake not to understand that no one else was like them, but he had to admit that leaning against the orphanage gates in the afternoon sunshine let him drift away from the sharpening pain in his stomach.  
  
He felt something tickle his knuckles and looked down to see a beetle pause on the back of his hand then scurry over his fingers and beneath the gates.  
  
He thought of the stark, soulless orphanage overrun with insects and rodents, a less disgusting populace than the previous one.  
  
He thought of a bomb dropping soundly into the midst of the orphanage and neatly imploding it. Would Dumbledore and Dippet make Tom return to its ruin?  
  
He thought of his future self, cold and fearless, mightier than any wizard; mightier than the sum of all Muggle power.

He thought and he’d prefer to spare the orphanage the bombs. One day he’d obliterate it with his own power.

  
*

  
Tom brought some food from school in his trunk under stasis, trying to be prepared for scarcity at the orphanage and avoid debasing himself with the orphans’ constant jockeying for rations. But that, of course meant nothing now.

  
  
*

There was no way to adequately prepare for anything when one wasn’t granted true control of his own life.  
  
Tom wanted his wand.

  
*

  
As his hunger increased, his natural caution atrophied.  
  
_I don’t need my magic to kill them_ , he told the snake one night. They were lying in the starless dark of the cellar beneath the abandoned bakery a block from the orphanage.  
  
_You’ll feel better,_ she said, half conscious in the dim cool, _when the sun is out. Keep still_ .  
  
He couldn’t.

  
  
*

  
  
Mr. Billings’s best pair of tailor’s shears would do very well, and were freshly sharpened. Jimmy, pale and uneasy, had nevertheless brought them upon request and handed them to Tom without comment. Tom made a pleased noise and thoughtlessly rested the palm of his hand on Jimmy’s head for a half moment. The boy fairly trembled in delight.  
  
He knew where the men were and what they would be doing in the late morning. He’d seen them a few weeks before and followed them from one usual haunt to another, and they slept in a flat above a shop with four other men. Their activities kept them out late and ensured they slept late as well. Tom came in through the window.  
  
It was shock and chaos that was needed, Tom knew, trying not to stare at the sight of his trunk in a corner of the room, half buried under a stained blanket and soiled clothing. There were six men here and Tom was one boy with just a pair of shears where he should have a wand.  
  
So he stabbed one of the men in the softness of his stomach and rolled immediately under the bed and out of sight.  
  
Then he fixed his sights on the three bodies visible from there, and focused hard on his singular wish that they experience violent pain.  
  
When Tom left the orphanage children like that for twenty seconds they were helpless for an hour afterward, but he held the connection longer now because it suited his purposes. He was hidden, except that the three convulsing bodies he kept in thrall had fallen to the floor, and one of them had seen Tom, and now stared at him with his crazed eyes.  
  
“What’s wrong with them?” Demanded another man. Not the man with the wound from the shears, who was still on the bed and screaming obscenities about Jove, who he had decided was his attacker.

The speaker sounded like the man who had stolen the trunk, the littler one who had give Tom a shrewd look, then dismissed him.  
  
“That woman what said she would haunt us,” said the last man, as the one Tom had stabbed finally stumbled from his bed and toward the door. “What should we...?” It was Jove, Tom thought, with another moment of vibrant rage. Jove who had hit Tom. Jove who had looked.

“Leave them,” said the leader. And the three men who could leave did.

That it had worked at all surprised Tom, as his pulse slowed and he realized he could safely go to his trunk. He crawled from beneath the bed, head beginning to ache from the focus of maintaining a punishment on three men at once. He pressed his hand against the lock on the trunk and it sprang open.  
  
Tom drew his wand.  
  
He didn’t take his time with the first three. It felt less personal with them, and anyway, he had to hurry. When he left through the door Jove and the other two had used, he was happy to see that, assisting their injured friend, they hadn’t gotten past the stairway.  
  
It was bloodier than he anticipated. In his excitement, he got carried away with a variety of spells not designed for violence, but the violent application of the mundane was the common subject of Tom’s daydreams in class at Hogwarts.  
  
When three ministry witches arrived in, one almost slipped and fell in the red pulp, and Tom, according to his plan, burst into tears.  
  
It was a plan that was also the product of daydreams — that answered the question, _could I ever get away with any of this?_  
  
“They tried to hurt me,” he said, with his eyes very wide and his voice very high. “I didn’t even think, I just took my wand and...”  
  
“There there,” interrupted one of the witches. She wrapped an arm around Tom’s shoulders and he didn’t let himself recoil. “You’re safe now.”  
  
He excused himself while they cleaned up, under the pretense of needing some air. One of them escorted him out into the street then kept a polite distance as he sat on the curb, out of earshot. In the dark, he knew she wouldn’t see Tom draw the snake from his pocket.

 _The first kill is the most unusual_ , said the snake. _Soon you will be adept_.

Tom thought back. The first kill was the least inventive, a blur. No, not a blur; he had killed the three summarily but he recalled exactly where he began. The one nearest the bed, a logical choice. The one who, helpless under Tom’s punishment, had fixed his gaze on Tom while Tom was beneath the stabbed one’s bed.

The second one was the one nearest the wall, so that the third was left between them. Tom, fatigued, had to drop the punishment in order to cast the final cutting spell, which gave the third man the opportunity to scream. He was ravaged by his punishment, though, and his cry of mere fear was strangled compared to his cry of pain.

The fourth on the stairs - the charm you used to crush moonstone, applied to his throat, but with so much force most of his torso was liquified too. It was the wiry leader. The fifth, the stabbed one, slipped on the gore on the stairs, as the auror later would, but instead of catching his balance he toppled headlong down to the landing and lie still. That left Jove.

Jove had hit Tom, and looked at him with a spark of interest. There were butchery spells that one learned in harvesting potions ingredients.

Tom took Jove’s hand and his eyes and the bones in his left leg, and that seemed to be enough for him to collapse and bleed to death. He died quickly and quietly, well before the trace on Tom’s wand delivered the ministry witches.

The snake dove into the dark and Tom began to get up, absently wondering what Dumbledore would have to say about all this. Tom knew by now he was meant to die this summer in a way they could call an accident, and though he felt a burst of satisfaction at foiling the deputy headmaster, he was too hungry to relish it.

He realized there was a pale shadow near the wall, watching him with wide eyes, except the right eye was permanently, slightly narrowed by the way the bones had knitted.

If Tom called attention to Jimmy, the ministry witches would Obliviate him. It was not a spell without cognitive risk, especially for a child. Tom decided enough had gone on in Jimmy’s head for one war, and no one would believe him anyway.

 

*

 

Professor Slughorn waited at the Ministry in an absurdly lacey green dressing gown. He nearly reached for Tom before seeming to notice the blood. Tom’s socks were wet with it.

“My boy, my boy,” he said piteously, and Tom wore a gracious, weary smile like the useful accessory it was.

“I’m fine, Professor,” he said, and noticed another figure, dressed for daytime, silver-shot red beard neatly brushed.

“We didn’t know how the Muggle War had escalated, Tom,” said Dumbledore gravely. This was his version of an apology, Tom thought, amused, as he noticed the ministry wizard looking at Dumbledore strangely. And he thought he was a match for Tom.

Tom regarded him and for a moment feigned nothing at all. A flicker of interest lit a moment in Dumbledore’s pale blue eyes, then Tom smiled again, with perfect skill. “Of course you mustn’t have, Professor.”

 

*

 

Tom held out — not hope, but something—at the end of the year, but when he was personally shepherded to the orphanage the following summer by Professor Slughorn, the place still stood.

“The war has moved on, they assure us,” said Professor Slughorn uneasily. “Here.” He handed Tom the emergency portkey that was the Ministry’s new concession for orphans in Muggle custody during extended holidays. Tom took it and clutched it very tightly, tempted to activate it at once.

His studies on the art of immortality were well along since last summer, but he had nothing concrete to show for them yet.

“Have a pleasant summer, Tom,” said Slughorn, eager to be gone. He parted with a final awkward nod and Tom was alone again.

But not quite. He saw a dark ribbon pass beneath the gate and bent to pick her up.

 _Speaker_ , she greeted. _How has your hunting fared?_

 _It has been slow,_ Tom told her, amused. He put her in his pocket and stepped through the gates. _The summer is my season for sport, it would seem._

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a challenge prompt on the Tomarry discord server. I hope it does the fascinating prompt some justice.


End file.
